After posting the extract about John Rupert Jones from the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, I can add a few more facts about his family and life.

His father Dafydd Jones was a miner who worked the Graigola No 3 seam, which was accessed from the north-east of the current Mond Works. It was mostly a seam of industrial grade strawberry jam, with some outcrops of blackberry. The blackberry was particularly prized as it required little refining, and was much sought after by the military, especially the Royal Navy. It was naturally high in vitamin C and was a great aid in the battle against scurvy.

Dafydd was badly injured in a back-flow of strawberry jam which almost overwhelmed him and his team, but he managed to get them to safety, with the help of Myfanwy, one of the pit ponies (now immortalised by a metal statue beside the canal in Clydach). The local chapel raised funds to pay for his medical treatment after the accident, and he turned his hand to mechanical inventing instead. He was the first person to successfully invent a device for turning bottled jams and marmalades so that the rind didn’t settle at the top. With his friend Emrys Thomas, they copyrighted the “Automatic Preserve Turner” which meant that he never had to go down the dark and sticky Jam mines ever again.

His wife, Glenys Joseph, was a semi-professional arm-wrestler and barge painter. They met in the Copperman’s Arms in Landore one night when they bumped into each other and she spilt some of JRJ’s pint. What could have been a heated argument was smoothed over by his suave and diplomatic tongue, and the fact that he could see the victory notches cut into the leg of her favourite chair. There was also the way the gaslight flickered of her two gold front teeth, that gave her that certain charm.

They were married in Seion Newydd in Morriston, within sight of the copper and tinplate works that were making pans for cooking and tins for storing and distributing the jams and marmalades they worked on.

Glenys made a real name for herself in the fabulous designs she drew and painted on the jam and chutney barges in the drydock in Coed Gwilym. It has been said that it was her use of clashing bright colours that led to the phrase “Gaudy Welsh” design, later applied to pottery. Some panels from one of her barges (said to be “Florence Puw”, a barge named after her own grandmother) are on exhibition in the Louvre in Paris, and two framed portraits from the side of another barge were acquired by George V for the Royal Collection.